Safe Doesn't Scale

Most B2B SaaS founders assume that more revenue requires more headcount, more product surface area, and eventually more capital. Adam Robinson's RB2B is a counter-example: a company about to cross $9M ARR where one person spends 15 minutes a day on support and the CTO hasn't touched the code in six weeks. The trade-off he made to get there is the part most founders never seriously consider.

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In Episode 13 of Safe Doesn't Scale, David Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with Adam Robinson, founder of RB2B and Retention.com. They cover what it actually takes to run three bootstrapped companies, why Adam is betting his next product entirely on AI agents and Claude Code, and how he turned LinkedIn into the cheapest distribution channel in B2B SaaS.

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Adam shares the real mechanics behind RB2B's growth: the deliberate decision to price below his competitors' cost of acquiring a customer, why a freemium PLG SMB funnel was the only path to the company he wanted to build, and the conversation with Klaviyo's Ed Hallen that changed how he thinks about venture capital.

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Adam Robinson is the founder and CEO of RB2B and Retention.com, two bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies that together cross $25M+ ARR with zero outside funding. RB2B identifies anonymous US website visitors at the person level and pushes them into Slack and CRMs in real time. Adam started his career as a credit default swap trader at Lehman Brothers before exiting the email marketing company Robly and building the identity-resolution category in e-commerce. He is now one of the most followed bootstrapped-founder voices on LinkedIn, hosts the weekly LIVE workshop Unf*ck My Startup, and is building MoltSets, a contact database designed for AI agents running on Claude Code.

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• Why MoltSets exists: Adam walks through the origin of his new product, sparked by a comment from Patrick Spychalski of The Kiln about replacing Clay workflows with Claude Code. The thesis is that contact data for autonomous agents is a different category than contact data for humans.
• The agent is the decision-maker: David presses on what changes when there's no UI and no human buyer. Adam explains why every contact database currently positions for humans, and what positioning ground-zero for agents would actually look like.
• How RB2B was built to run on 15 minutes a day: Adam describes the day-one intention to build the leanest system possible so AI could amplify human labor 1,000X. The trade-off was accepting a cap on revenue in exchange for near-zero operational input.
• Pricing below your competitor's CAC: The mechanics that let RB2B underprice every competitor: a cheap awareness channel through Adam's LinkedIn, no marginal cost of fulfilling a contact, and a data team already paid for by sister product lines.
• Why competitors built feature wars Adam wouldn't fight: When every other vendor went after $30K/year contracts, Adam kept RB2B frozen at $79 to get started in 60 seconds. The result: no direct competitors anymore.
• The Klaviyo conversation that hardened his anti-VC stance: Adam recounts what Ed Hallen told him about the real drivers of Klaviyo's outcome, why most founders dramatically overestimate the durability of their traction, and the Shopify wave that no one saw coming.
• When VC actually makes sense: Adam draws the line. Fyxer in the UK with 155% net revenue retention, massive TAM, and a working Meta funnel into corporate middle managers: go big. Everything else: rethink it.
• Content as the cheapest distribution in B2B: Adam breaks down his weekly cadence. One four-hour block on Tuesdays, a strategy call with his consultant Alec Paul, and three posts a week that drive 90% of RB2B's awareness.
• The Claude Code workshop bet: Why Adam thinks aggregating attention around Claude Skills for go-to-market is his single highest-leverage move for the next twelve months, and how it pulls through to MoltSets without ever pitching it.
• Running three product lines without running three companies: Adam's executive team structure, why he refuses to scale headcount past what AI can replace, and what kind of operator can thrive inside the constraint.
• Why "lifestyle business" is the wrong frame: Adam pushes back on the assumption that bootstrapped founders should put their feet up at $30M ARR. The actual answer is about loving the craft, not optimizing for ease.

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• RB2B: Adam's B2B person-level website visitor identification tool, the focus of most of the conversation.
• Retention.com: Adam's e-commerce identity resolution company, the precursor to RB2B.
• Clay: The GTM data platform Adam discusses as the closest existing analog to what MoltSets is doing for AI agents.
• Claude Code: Anthropic's coding agent, central to Adam's thesis about how go-to-market work will be done.
• Klaviyo: The Shopify-era email marketing success Adam uses to illustrate why VC outcomes depend on luck founders can't engineer.
• Fyxer AI: The UK email company Adam names as a legitimate case for raising venture, citing its TAM and net revenue retention.
• beehiiv: Tyler Denk's company, cited as one of the few other B2B SaaS founders publishing financials in public.
• Rework: Jason Fried's book, which Adam credits as his single biggest influence as a founder.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

Most B2B brands run a handful of creator posts, see lukewarm results, and conclude influencer marketing doesn't work for their category. The real issue is almost always the model: one-off campaigns, no continuity, no brand narrative building, no compounding effect.

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David Walsh, founder of Limelight, sits down with AJ Eckstein to get into what makes creator programs actually work, from the always-on cadence and quarterly splash model to IRL brand experiences, paid media integration, and how creator content is becoming an asset in AI-driven search.

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AJ has run some of the most recognized B2B creator campaigns in the world. This conversation draws on what he's learned building programs for Anthropic, HubSpot, Notion, and Zapier, including a few moments where things went wrong before they went right.

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Guest Bio

AJ Eckstein is Founder and CEO of Creator Match, a tech-enabled agency that builds and scales creator programs for B2B and SaaS brands. His client roster includes Anthropic, HubSpot, Notion, Zapier, Wix, beehiiv, BetterHelp, Airtable, and Gusto. Before Creator Match, AJ spent three years as a management consultant at Accenture advising Fortune 500 companies. He is a TEDx speaker, a Fast Company journalist, and has launched three LinkedIn Learning courses with more than 200,000 students enrolled. Outside work, he competes in marathons, ultramarathons, and triathlons, and logged 55 flights last year.

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What We Cover

• Marketplace vs. agency: two solutions to the same problem. AJ and David break down how Creator Match and Limelight serve very different customer needs within the same creator marketing space, and why AJ regularly refers brands to Limelight when they're not ready for an agency.
• IRL to URL: why in-person experiences are the new campaign strategy. AJ explains his philosophy of bridging real-life events to digital content, including how Creator Match brought 30 AI creators to Utah for a multi-day hackathon with Zapier's full C-suite, and why B2B has been slow to adopt what B2C brands have done at Coachella for years.
• Where creator marketing budgets actually live. AJ walks through how influencer programs are funded across brand budgets, awareness budgets, and paid media budgets, and why the ad budget is often the right source for boosting and usage rights spend.
• The most expensive mistake B2B brands make with creators. Running one-off campaigns instead of programs. AJ breaks down the cost, retention, and relationship consequences of buying creator content a la carte versus committing to an always-on model.
• Always-on plus the quarterly splash. AJ describes the two-layer program structure Creator Match builds: a monthly evergreen content cadence that maintains brand presence, and periodic high-impact moments like the Notion Faces campaign or a creator brand trip designed to take over a feed.
• Influencer marketing belongs under brand, not growth. A CMO AJ spoke with on the day of recording was moving their influencer program out of growth and demand and placing it under brand. AJ explains why this organizational shift reflects how the channel actually works.
• Saying no to revenue: how AJ qualifies out bad-fit clients. AJ shares how 90% of Creator Match's inbound calls don't convert, why that's intentional, and how he routes brands to talent agencies or marketplace partners like Limelight instead of forcing a fit that will churn.
• Defining success before the campaign brief. AJ explains the question he asks every brand before signing: what does success look like, quantitatively and qualitatively? He walks through the three goal types his team now works against: upper-funnel awareness, bottom-funnel performance, and AI search presence.
• How creator content is becoming an AI search asset. Creator-produced YouTube dedicated videos, LinkedIn Pulse articles, and Reddit posts are what LLMs surface when buyers search comparison queries. AJ explains the shift in playbook required to optimize for this channel, including different creator profiles, brief structures, and tracking approaches.
• Full-stack creator marketing and ecosystem marketing. AJ lays out Creator Match's big bet: moving from LinkedIn-focused campaigns to multi-channel creator programs across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, with paid media, IRL brand trips, and influencer gifting woven in as a unified ecosystem strategy.

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Resources Mentioned

• Creator Match: AJ's agency, referenced throughout as the source of the campaigns, frameworks, and client examples discussed.
• Limelight: David's B2B influencer marketplace, discussed as a complementary partner to Creator Match for brands not ready for agency spend.
• Zapier: Creator Match client featured in the discussion of IRL brand experiences; hosted the Zapier Outpost creator trip in Utah.
• Notion: Early Creator Match client; the Notion Faces campaign is cited as an example of a high-impact quarterly splash that drove brand awareness without traditional attribution.
• Airtable: Used as an example throughout the AI search optimization discussion, illustrating how dedicated creator videos can help a brand rank in LLM-driven comparison queries.
• SaaStr: Conference David attended the week of recording; AJ spoke at SaaStr Austin the prior year.
• Perplexity: Cited alongside Claude and ChatGPT as an LLM platform where buyer decisions are increasingly being made.
• Claude: Referenced as one of the LLMs buyers now use to research and compare software products.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

Most B2B content gets posted at the wrong stage - after the win, after the launch, after it's clean. The founders building real pipeline post from inside the process. That gap is growing.

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David Walsh, founder of Limelight, talks with Shoaib Ahmed about what actually works on LinkedIn right now: why the playbook has shifted, how to use AI without producing noise, and what brands keep getting wrong about creator partnerships.

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Shoaib Ahmed is Founder and Director of SA Personal Branding, a LinkedIn growth consultancy based in Manchester, UK. He's built 205+ personal brands, generated 300M+ organic impressions, and driven £11.2M in attributed client revenue for his clients. Named Lone Wolf Business Consultancy of the Year at the 2026 Business Consultancy Awards and North West Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023. Currently, fractional Head of Content at Limelight.

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• Why B2B content is posted too late: Building brand before the launch - not after - is how founders show up to launch day with an audience already in place.
• Gen Z changing LinkedIn: A 22-year-old building a seven-figure business on content is forcing seasoned executives to rethink how they show up on the platform.
• How LinkedIn has changed: Newsfeeds are saturated, AI lowered the barrier, and a single viral post no longer converts without sustained brand behind it.
• Educator vs. practitioner: AI can write a five-step listicle. It can't prove you've done the thing. Experience and case studies are the real differentiator now.
• Getting comfortable on camera: Shoaib runs a 90-minute informal interview with every new client to find what they're confident about - and what they gloss over. He explains how to share vulnerable stories without tipping into self-indulgence.
• The AI copywriting framework: Build a campaign first - timeline, objective, metric, content mix - then use AI inside that system. Always give it a unique entry point only you can provide.
• Why creators are finally doing brand deals: 80-90% of LinkedIn influencers told Limelight no to paid partnerships early on. Two years later, the same group was overwhelmingly active. Shoaib explains the shift.
• When brand partnerships go wrong: Promoting competitors back to back, stacking too many deals at once, posting without understanding the product - Shoaib breaks down the failure modes and what long-term campaigns look like instead.
• Shoaib's three bets for the next 12 months: Owned audience, video, and AI-driven systems for content ideation.

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• RB2B - Adam Robinson's company, cited as a benchmark for founder-led LinkedIn content.
• Limelight - B2B creator ad platform; David shares data on how creator attitudes toward paid partnerships shifted over two years.
• ChatGPT - Referenced as an AI tool for content ideation, with caveats on prompting correctly.
• Claude - Named as an example of how AI has made educational content accessible to anyone - and why that raises the bar for originality.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

B2B marketing has become a sea of automated noise and generic outreach. Buyers are doing their own research in hidden channels, yet sales teams are still relying on outdated playbooks and spray-and-pray tactics. The companies winning today aren't just sending more emails: they are building entirely new go-to-market systems built on genuine interaction and behavioral data.

I am your host, David Walsh, and today we sit down with Bruno Basic, who recently helped steer a $90 million Series A launch out of stealth mode. We break down the exact strategies used to generate massive demand for a highly technical software product. You will walk away with a clear understanding of how to blend creator-led campaigns with hyper-targeted paid advertising.

Bruno brings a systems-thinking approach to growth that bridges the gap between marketing and sales efficiency. He shares his real-world data on using niche social creators to build brand awareness in the finance sector. We also talk about his specific approach to avoiding automated slop, keeping copywriting human, and why ignoring your ad platform representatives is a costly mistake.

Bruno Basic is the Go-to-Market Leader and Head of Growth at DualEntry, a New York-based AI-native ERP software company. Taking a hands-on approach to scaling revenue, Bruno operates across marketing, paid advertising, and customer success. He recently helped launch DualEntry out of stealth mode, supporting a massive $90 million Series A funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. A multi-faceted leader, he frequently engages directly with users to ensure a tight iteration loop between market signals and product development.

• Launching out of stealth mode: Bruno details the exact creator-led strategy DualEntry used to announce their Series A funding. The campaign drove thousands of likes, hundreds of comments, and booked their sales calendars out for three months straight.
• The death of legacy tech: The market is ripe for AI-native tools because legacy software suffers from clunky user interfaces and long implementation times. As Gen Z enters the workforce, they expect intuitive, fast software, making old enterprise tools obsolete.
• Niche creator marketing: B2B companies often assume there are no content creators in their specific industry. Bruno explains how finding highly specific sub-verticals, like Excel creators for finance professionals, moves the needle for brand awareness.
• Mastering revenue attribution: If you are spending heavily on multi-channel advertising in 2026, a basic dashboard is not enough. You need proper attribution software to map every touchpoint from organic social posts to booked demos.
• Avoiding automated slop: Many growth gurus recommend using AI to automate research and outreach messaging. Bruno strongly disagrees with this approach, arguing that genuine copywriting and highly segmented lists perform better than generic bot emails.
• Simple but effective automations: Instead of building complex AI chat threads, Bruno prefers basic operational alerts. His team uses simple Slack notifications to ping account executives the moment a prospect replies to an outreach email.
• In-person dinners for enterprise deals: To capture mid-market and enterprise buyers, DualEntry relies on curated offline events. These dinners provide a space to educate buyers on specific problems and regularly result in signed contracts.
• Listening to your ad reps: Many founders ignore calls from Meta or Google representatives out of fear of being sold to. Bruno shares how answering these calls gave his team early access to beta features like Reddit Max campaigns, drastically reducing their cost per click.
• Bridging sales and marketing: A growth leader must actively help the sales team save time. Whether it is eliminating spreadsheet work or automating lead handoffs, making reps faster directly impacts top-line revenue.

• DualEntry - An AI-native ERP system built to replace legacy finance software with automated workflows and modern interfaces.
• Limelight - A B2B influencer marketplace used to organize and scale creator-led marketing campaigns.
• HockeyStack - A B2B marketing attribution platform used to track the complete buyer journey across organic and paid channels.
• Dreamdata - A B2B revenue attribution tool mentioned as a key player in understanding marketing touchpoints.
• Clay - A data provider and automation tool used for finding ideal customer profiles and tracking hiring signals.

Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

B2B companies routinely drop tens of thousands of dollars on event booths to reach a tiny fraction of their market. Meanwhile, they completely ignore the platform where millions of decision-makers hang out daily. This massive misallocation of budget happens because marketers get lazy and default to the old playbook instead of adapting to modern attention.

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David Walsh sits down with Niall Ratcliffe to break down how B2B brands can stop wasting money and start driving actual pipeline through LinkedIn. Listeners will walk away with the exact steps to build an organic marketing engine that generates high-intent conversations. Niall has a track record of doing exactly this, having built a six-figure run rate for his agency in just 11 days.

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Niall brings a refreshing, anti-fluff perspective to social selling, treating content strictly as a mechanism to fish for leads rather than chase vanity metrics. He shares the exact incentive structure his small team uses to generate 17 million organic impressions a year without spending a dime on ads. He also opens up about his early realization at 19 years old, watching founders raise eight-figure rounds directly in their direct messages, which pushed him to go all in on the platform.

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Guest Bio

Niall Ratcliffe is the CEO and co-founder of noticed., a B2B marketing agency specializing in creative account-based marketing and LinkedIn strategies. He launched the business with his brother from a spare room in Burnley, hitting a six-figure run rate in under two weeks. Today, the agency works with major brands and is on track to close over a million pounds in sales through LinkedIn alone this year. Niall is also a recognized voice in B2B marketing, ranking in the top one percent of UK creators and writing the highly popular "Growing Viral" newsletter. Before starting his own company, he got his start in marketing at an agency that focused entirely on building personal brands for individuals rather than businesses.

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What We Cover

• The problem with traditional B2B marketing: Companies are spending up to 50,000 pounds on conference booths to reach a few thousand attendees. Niall explains why redirecting a fraction of that budget to skilled sales representatives on LinkedIn yields significantly more conversations.
• Starting an employee advocacy program: Getting a team to post consistently requires more than just asking them. Niall outlines a tiered incentive structure that rewards employees with audiobooks, dinners, and weekend getaways as they hit specific follower milestones.
• Creating a culture of content creation: Highlighting team wins on Friday all-hands calls is crucial for momentum. Providing templates, post archives, and video training reduces the friction for employees who are new to sharing their thoughts publicly.
• Tracking the revenue impact of organic content: Trying to attribute every single dollar to a specific LinkedIn post will set leaders up for failure. Instead, executives need to look at qualitative signals like easier hiring, brand recognition on sales calls, and overall market presence.
• Why viral posts fail to drive pipeline: Content should be treated as a fishing net for high-intent buyers. A highly personal post might get nearly three million views but generate zero inbound leads, whereas a niche post with 60 likes can give a sales team a perfect list of active prospects to contact.
• Navigating the LinkedIn algorithm: Chasing weekly algorithm updates is a losing strategy that distracts from core messaging. Currently, long-form articles and carousels are performing best because they maximize dwell time, while video is lagging in reach but remains important for building trust.
• The LinkedIn Pyramid system: Driving serious revenue on the platform comes down to three foundational layers: positioning, content, and outreach. Most companies can easily generate millions in sales using just these three elements before they ever need to touch paid advertising.
• Future trends in B2B marketing: The industry is splitting into two extreme directions. Companies will either lean heavily into AI and social automation, or they will shift toward hyper-personalized, traditional tactics like direct mail and creative account-based marketing.

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Resources Mentioned

• Cargo - The personal branding agency where Niall got his start and witnessed the power of marketing individuals.
• Trigger Fi - An intent tracking tool mentioned for organizing and acting on engagement data from your content.
• Team Influence - Another software platform suggested for tracking profile views and intent signals.
• HubSpot - A customer relationship management system recommended for tracking qualitative attribution from social media conversations.
• Daniel Priestley - An author and entrepreneur referenced for his philosophy on building a key person of influence in an industry.
• Flawd - A Manchester-based business praised for successfully using founder-led content and a sales team to drive revenue.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

Traditional bottom-of-funnel paid ads are becoming unsustainably expensive, and standard SEO strategies are losing their impact. Marketing budgets are tightening, yet the pressure to deliver growth has never been higher. Brands are forced to find new ways to grab attention, but many are still wasting millions on inefficient channels rather than building their own distribution engines.

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Host David Walsh sits down with Casey Hill, Chief Marketing Officer at DoWhatWorks, to dissect what is actually working in B2B marketing right now. They discuss the critical shift toward optimizing websites for both human intent and machine indexing, moving beyond generic calls to action. Listeners will walk away with actionable frameworks for creating proprietary distribution channels and leveraging public data to make smarter growth decisions.

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Casey brings a wealth of knowledge from analyzing tens of thousands of real-world website experiments. He shares a personal misstep from his early days on LinkedIn, where posting highly valuable but dry test data completely flopped. By shifting his focus to novelty and replicability, Casey built an organic content engine that now drives forty percent of his company's closed business.

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Guest Bio

Casey Hill is a growth veteran and the Chief Marketing Officer at DoWhatWorks, a technology startup fundamentally changing how brands approach conversion rate optimization. He has over a decade of experience scaling software companies and providing institutional guidance to top global firms on pricing, market analysis, and inbound marketing. Throughout his career, Casey has garnered millions of views across social platforms by pioneering creative growth levers. He brings a deeply analytical yet human approach to B2B marketing, commanding an audience of over 26,000 followers on LinkedIn who tune in for his insights on what top brands are actually testing.

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What We Cover

• The decline of traditional channels: Conventional paid ads and standard programmatic SEO are showing severe diminishing returns. Marketing leaders must adapt as the core line items for enterprise budgets shift toward new models of discovery.
• Flipping the testing script: Instead of guessing and failing internally, companies can observe public data from major brands. Analyzing thousands of verified tests allows teams to make data-backed decisions faster and cheaper.
• The power of novelty and replicability: Casey learned that highly valuable data alone does not win on social media. Content needs a unique angle and an easy way for the audience to replicate the success in order to gain real traction.
• Why Learn More kills conversions: Ambiguity is a massive barrier for website visitors trying to understand what happens next. Specific calls to action generate significantly higher click-through rates because they set a clear expectation for the user.
• The rising bar for social proof: Static logo bars are no longer enough to build credibility with buyers. The market demands higher trust signals, making contextualized video testimonials and verifiable quotes far more effective.
• Optimizing for humans and machines: Modern websites must balance creative design with rigid structural clarity. Clear subheaders and specific capability language help pages index properly in large language models while keeping users engaged.
• Building a distribution engine: Proprietary data and built-in distribution are the two most defensible moats in marketing today. Without a reliable way to distribute content organically, brands are forced to rely on highly inefficient paid channels.
• Owning the category through content: Instead of paying influencers for one-off promotions, brands should focus on associating themselves with a specific industry category. Creating assets that get widely cited by other publications creates a powerful long-tail effect.
• Bringing influencers in-house: A highly underutilized strategy involves hiring creators to run owned media assets like newsletters or podcasts. This gives the brand long-term ownership of the audience and lead flow while leveraging the creator's existing trust.
• Writing for a person of one: Creating content designed for a specific persona yields much better results than writing broad, generic copy. Speaking directly to one ideal buyer increases the chances of generating valuable shares and saves.

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Resources Mentioned

• DoWhatWorks - A platform that aggregates real-world A/B test data from major brands to help companies optimize their websites.
• DoWhatWorks Substack - Casey's weekly newsletter offering deep-dive analyses on proven website optimization strategies.
• WhisperFlow - A voice-to-text tool praised for balancing a highly creative website design with functional clarity.
• Sundial - A startup highlighted for its clean website layout and highly specific demo call to action.
• Glean - An enterprise SaaS company that doubled its homepage click-through rate by eliminating generic button text.
• Ramp - A financial company cited as a great example of clearly organizing multiple products in a website subheader.
• Brex - Another financial brand praised for its clear capability language and website structure.
• Claude - An AI tool David used to instantly audit and restructure his custom-built website.
• Supabase - Mentioned for a unique profile text strategy that resulted in long-tail content distribution.
• Gusto - Referenced for hiring economists to produce category-owning content rather than standard promotional material.
• SparkToro - Rand Fishkin's company, noted for building visual content specifically designed to be shared in private team channels.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

B2B marketing has historically relied on a predictable playbook of cold emails and phone calls. But today, buyers are exhausted by the endless spam and automated sequences flooding their inboxes. The brands winning in this new era are realizing that they are not selling to faceless corporations, but to real people who want to be entertained and engaged.

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David Walsh sits down with Selin Kocalar to explore why the most effective B2B marketing strategies look exactly like consumer marketing. They discuss how to build brand awareness in traditionally boring industries and why doing unscalable things often drives the highest revenue. Selin brings a unique perspective as an MIT researcher-turned-Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur who has completely rewritten the SaaS marketing rulebook.

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Selin shares how her team embraces radical experimentation to stand out in the crowded compliance software space. She breaks down the mechanics of viral growth hacks, from delivering custom doormats to renting massive billboards. Along the way, she reveals her philosophy as the self-appointed Chief Bad Ideas Officer and explains why every marketing team needs an intentional budget for failure.

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Guest Bio

Selin Kocalar is the Co-Founder and COO of Delve, an AI-native compliance platform trusted by over 1,500 fast-growing companies. Before building compliance automation, Selin was an AI researcher at Stanford and MIT who helped design CRISPR-based gene-editing technologies. She dropped out of MIT to scale her current company and was recently named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. As a founder who proudly claims the internal title of Chief Bad Ideas Officer, Selin leads a lean growth team that consistently outperforms much larger competitors through creative, unconventional campaigns.

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What We Cover

1. The shift to B2C tactics: B2B marketing used to run perfectly fine on cold outreach alone. Selin explains why the industry is shifting and why B2B marketing is essentially just consumer marketing with a six-month lag.
2. Marketing a boring product: Compliance is historically a headache that nobody wants to think about. Selin shares how posting tangentially related, entertaining content captures attention much better than pitching product features.
3. The Highway 101 billboard hack: The growth team assembled a massive physical wall of love from customers' Post-it notes. This offline stunt was amplified across social media to prioritize brand memorability over immediate conversions.
4. Viral donuts and doormats: Selin details two highly successful physical marketing campaigns that targeted startup founders. Delivering custom doormats referencing SOC 2 compliance cost around $5,000 but influenced millions in the sales pipeline.
5. Budgeting for marketing failure: If a marketing team is not failing, it means they are relying too heavily on outdated playbooks. Selin discusses why she intentionally sets aside experimental budget to test completely new channels and ideas.
6. Optimizing for brand memorability: The team specifically optimizes campaigns to ensure people remember the brand rather than pushing for an immediate demo. This top-of-funnel awareness pays off massively when buyers eventually need compliance tools.
7. Authentic founder-led content: Agencies and ghostwriters cannot truly replicate a founder's unique perspective. Selin explains her process for quickly generating high-quality social posts that build deep trust with their audience.
8. Creating an influencer echo chamber: Partnering with creators was initially an uncertain bet for a compliance company. Now, coordinating multiple influencer posts on launch days creates a viral effect that drives significant brand awareness.
9. Mastering generative AI visibility: Generative AI search engines are becoming a crucial discovery channel for software buyers. Selin and David discuss the importance of producing high-quality content to control the narrative when prospects search on ChatGPT or Claude.

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Resources Mentioned

1. Delve - Selin's AI-native compliance platform that helps companies achieve SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO certifications.
2. Limelight - David's B2B influencer marketplace that the guest uses to sponsor creator content.
3. ChatGPT - Mentioned as a key platform where brands must optimize their content for generative engine visibility.
4. Claude - Noted alongside other AI models as a vital search surface for potential software buyers.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

AI promised to make B2B go-to-market strategies effortless, but it actually just flooded everyone's inbox with generic noise. As automated outreach scales, buyer trust plummets, leaving marketing teams wondering why their massive volume plays are falling flat. The uncomfortable truth is that the tactics that refuse to scale are the exact ones driving the highest returns.

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David Walsh sits down with Michel Lieben, CEO and Founder of ColdIQ, to dissect what is actually working in modern B2B sales. Michel built a multi-million dollar revenue engine within 31 months by taking a completely contrarian approach to content and outreach. Listeners will walk away with a blueprint for cutting through the automated clutter and building genuine authority.

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Michel brings hard data to the table, proving that 70% of his agency's leads come directly from a highly orchestrated LinkedIn strategy. He shares his exact framework for turning an entire workforce into a localized army of content creators, adding $155K in monthly recurring revenue in a single quarter. He also reveals his unconventional approach to SEO, which involves embedding functional technology right into blog posts.

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Guest Bio

Michel Lieben is the Founder and CEO at ColdIQ, a sales prospecting and go-to-market agency that helps B2B organizations build scalable revenue engines. Scaling the agency from zero to over $6 million in Annual Recurring Revenue in just 31 months, Michel heavily leverages a viral content strategy and technical engineering rather than traditional mass outbound methods. He commands an audience of over 65,000 followers on LinkedIn and runs a weekly newsletter delivering sales tech news and tool reviews. Despite running a tech-heavy outbound agency, Michel is a vocal advocate for leading with value and human connection in sales. When he is not building systems or creating content, you can likely find him working from Barcelona and planning his next live event.

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What We Cover

• The Death of Lazy AI Tactics: Michel explains why generic, automated outreach is failing across every acquisition channel. He highlights that flooding inboxes with thoughtless messaging only alienates prospects instead of converting them.
• Quality That Actually Scales: Instead of relying on mass volume, Michel advocates for targeting a micro-list of 25 highly qualified prospects. Taking the time to craft genuine, human-written messages creates a reusable foundation that outperforms automated spam.
• Commitment to Content Creation: Consistency is the highest hurdle for new creators. Michel details his initial promise to post on LinkedIn every working day for three months straight, regardless of early engagement metrics.
• Building an Employee Advocacy Machine: Getting a team to create content requires executive buy-in and absolute frictionless execution. By providing his team with dedicated visual designers, Michel enabled his employees to generate 583 posts and add $155K in MRR in a single quarter.
• The Power of Visual Hooks: Adding strong visual elements to text posts dramatically increases visibility and engagement. Michel notes that custom infographics can multiply a post's reach by up to ten times simply by capturing attention in the feed.
• SEO Through Interactive Tech: Traditional SEO is losing ground to AI search platforms like ChatGPT. To compete, ColdIQ embeds functional mini-tools directly into their blog posts, allowing readers to experience the solution rather than just reading about it.
• The Hidden Waste in Paid Ads: Many marketing teams burn through budget on search platforms without realizing they are paying for branded clicks they would have won organically. Michel points out that paid ads rarely build long-term brand trust.
• Arbitrage in B2B Influencer Marketing: The most effective way to enter a market is by borrowing credibility from established voices. Partnering with industry creators educates the market through diverse perspectives and builds immediate trust for new software products.
• Optimizing for the Answer Engine: Content must now be structured for Large Language Models to consume and reference. Michel ensures his team formats their output to appear in generated answers, securing visibility in the next generation of search.
• Combating AI Slop with Live Events: As the internet fills with automated content, human authenticity becomes a premium asset. Michel announces an upcoming shift toward interactive, in-person events in Barcelona to prove human involvement and build deeper connections.

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Resources Mentioned

• Clay - Mentioned as a key tool in modern data enrichment and a prime example of a brand successfully leveraging creator partnerships.
• FullEnrich - Highlighted by Michel as an effective platform that relied on B2B influencer associations to build early market trust.
• Instantly - Noted as a core piece of the outbound tech stack that powers massive scale for ColdIQ and their clients.
• Limelight - David Walsh's B2B influencer marketplace, discussed as a platform that could benefit from frictionless, embedded tech to drive user acquisition.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

B2B marketing is stuck in a loop of diminishing returns, with companies continuing to blast tired email lists and buy contacts, ignoring the massive shift toward human-led growth. The "safe" bet of traditional outbound is actually the riskiest play in 2026 because buyers have tuned out the noise. Real scale now comes from borrowing the trust that creators have already earned.

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Host David Walsh sits down with Justin Levy to dismantle the myth that influencer marketing is just for brand awareness. They discuss how a properly architected creator program can outperform entire marketing departments in driving a qualified pipeline. Justin shares the exact playbook he used to scale ZoomInfo's influencer program from a pilot to a multi-million dollar revenue engine.

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He breaks down the math behind replacing expensive ad spend with trusted voices and why "safe" metrics like impressions are useless without revenue attribution. Justin also details his "calculated risk" approach to budgeting: how he secured funding by guaranteeing registration numbers that traditional channels couldn't match.

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Guest Bio

Justin Levy is a veteran B2B marketing executive with over 20 years of experience leading social and influencer programs. He most recently served as the Director of Social Media & Influencer Marketing at ZoomInfo, where he built their creator program from the ground up to drive millions in pipeline. Previously, he held leadership roles at Demandbase, ServiceNow, and Citrix. Justin is also the author of Facebook Marketing and a sought-after speaker on the intersection of community and revenue.

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What We Cover

• The failure of traditional B2B: Why companies revert to spamming email lists despite data showing the creator economy is exploding and outbound efficiency is plummeting.
• Front-loading budget: How Justin secured budget for a major virtual event by guaranteeing and delivering 50% of the registration goal using only a handful of creators.
• Revenue over reach: The importance of tracking full-funnel metrics like pipeline and ACV rather than vanity metrics like likes or impressions to prove value to the C-suite.
• The efficiency of creators: How a small group of 18-20 influencers generated 30% of all event leads, outperforming massive traditional marketing efforts.
• Niche vs. Macro: Why creators with 4,500 followers often deliver better ROI and engagement than those with 450,000 followers who have suffered from audience drift.
• Testing frameworks: Why 30-day "pay per post" tests fail and why a 3-month partnership minimum is necessary to get valid data and build a relationship.
• Qualitative metrics: Evaluating creators based on responsiveness, adherence to briefs, and "ease of work" rather than just the quantitative numbers.
• Diversifying platforms: Moving beyond LinkedIn to include YouTube, Newsletters, and TikTok to reach audiences where they actually consume content.
• Attribution modeling: Using tools to track engagement from executive and influencer posts all the way to closed-won revenue to justify budget increases.
• Segmenting for value: How ZoomInfo didn't just look at lead volume but analyzed how many influencer-generated leads were "upmarket" enterprise accounts.

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Resources Mentioned

• ZoomInfo - The go-to-market platform where Justin built and scaled his revenue-first influencer program.
• Limelight - The B2B influencer marketplace and tracking platform used by ZoomInfo to attribute creator content to revenue.
• Goldman Sachs Creator Economy Report - Referenced statistics on the rapid acceleration and value of the creator economy.

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Safe Doesn't Scale is hosted by David Walsh, founder of Limelight. New episodes drop weekly.

Traffic is down 10-30% across nearly every B2B company. And yet you still can't afford to stop creating content. That's the paradox at the center of this conversation - and the tension that makes it worth your time.

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David Walsh sits down with Jason Patel, CEO and co-founder of OpenForge AI, to break down why top-of-funnel content is dying, what to do instead, and why the companies ignoring GEO and AEO right now are going to regret it. This is the SEO-in-2005 moment, and most marketing teams are still asleep.

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Jason draws from conversations with roughly 2,000 companies, two founder journeys, and a bootstrap exit to lay out a practical, no-fluff framework for getting your brand seen by AI search engines. He also gets personal about the mistakes that cost him money, time, and margin early on - and what he's doing differently this time around.

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Guest Bio

Jason Patel is the CEO and co-founder of OpenForge AI, a platform of AI agents that helps businesses grow their brand visibility on AI search engines and outrank the competition. Before OpenForge AI, Jason built and sold an edtech company, running a bootstrapped SEO operation that consistently outranked competitors who had raised $40 to $60 million. He exited that company in August 2023. He's also a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu brown belt.

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What We Cover

• Why top of funnel content is dying: Jason explains how AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have no incentive to cite generic informational content - and what that means for your traffic right now.
• The content paradox: The top of the funnel is being automated and subsumed by AI, yet you still can't afford to stop creating content. The answer is to shift the focus to commercial and transactional intent queries instead.
• The BLUF Method and liftable content: Jason breaks down the Animalz Bottom Line Upfront (BLUF) framework and explains why content that teaches AI something new through information gain is what actually gets cited.
• The SAFE framework for content structure: Straightforward, Actionable, Functional, Executable - a practical system for writing content that works for both human readers and AI systems.
• How Jason bet on YouTube in 2019 while in debt: With JP Morgan Chase credit cards as his first investor, Jason went all in on YouTube while his venture-backed competitors sat it out - and YouTube became 20 to 30% of his pipeline by acquisition.
• The real lesson from undercharging: Jason reflects on pricing too low, not paying himself enough, and how trying to be liked cost him margin, flexibility, and optionality for years.
• Why GEO is the SEO of 2005: The window to get ahead of this is open right now. Jason explains how to start with zero budget - just ChatGPT and the right questions - to find where your industry is getting cited.
• Creator content and LLM citations: Brands running creator content programs are already seeing their posts cited in LLMs. Jason explains why trust-based, high-conversion audiences matter more than raw reach in the AI era.

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Resources Mentioned

• OpenForge AI - Jason's platform for GEO and AEO
• Animalz - Content marketing company that developed the BLUF (Bottom Line Upfront) method
• G2 - B2B software review platform mentioned as a key citation source for SaaS brands
• SEMrush - Referenced as a major player in the SEO space, recently acquired for approximately $2 billion
• ChatGPT - Used throughout as the primary example of AI search behavior
• Gemini - Mentioned alongside ChatGPT as a competing AI search platform
• Perplexity - Named as one of the AI systems summarizing and replacing top-of-funnel content
• Crunchbase - Referenced in the context of investor outreach automations
• Lovable - Mentioned as an example of how fast competitors can now replicate software features
• Brian Chesky of Airbnb - Quoted on ruthless compassion in business decisions
• Limelight - David Walsh's B2B influencer marketplace